Chan Culture

Chan culture is typically irreverent, edgy, and trollish.

Original posters of imageboard threads can quickly have their thread die and be forgotten if the thread does not get enough engagement. This means there's a survival of the fittest mechanism at work. The threads people tend to see are the threads that provoked a steady stream of people to comment. If a thread does not capture people's attention to the point of making them bump the thread with a comment, the thread will die.

Depending on context different things capture people's attention. A successful poster will have an instinct for what sort of provocative statements or content will drive an engaging thread. Often the successful poster is mean, edgy or playing some sort of trick. But there are other successful strategies posters can play on.

This does not describe all of chan posters on all of the various boards, some boards are more heavily moderated than others. But this does describe the tendencies of the most famous boards on 4chan and 8chan, like /pol/ and /b/.